Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [103]
“We are going to a different terminal,” he said. “There are no commercial flights to Turkey, so Boris has sent his plane.”
Five days later Sasha was sitting next to me, with Marina and Tolik on the back seat, driving from Ankara to Istanbul, where this story and our friendship began. The fog was thick—as thick, Marina thought, as the uncertainty of exile about which Boris had spoken.
Sasha finished relating his biography, bringing it up to my entrance the previous day and our visit to the American Embassy.
“So what was it that the Americans wanted from you?” I asked.
“Ah,” he grinned. “Everyone has his own problems. They wanted to know how we got hold of the missile that hit Dudayev. That homing system was an American toy, you know. For four years, they could not figure out how we got it.”
“And you know?”
“Sure I do.” He told me about Khokholkov’s visit to Germany and Khokholkov’s American contact.
“You know the identity of his contact?”
“I found it out just by accident once upon a time in Moscow.”
“So you told them the name?”
“Yeah. The FSB has been calling me a traitor for three years, and now I am one. A self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“You are not a traitor, Sasha,” said Marina. “You did it in self-defense.”
“Let me tell you a story,” I said. “Once upon a time in Germany, there was this guy in the Foreign Office. He volunteered to spy for the Americans, and was their most important spy during World War II. He warned that the Germans were planning to kill all the Jews in Italy. So tell me, was he a traitor or a hero?”
“For you maybe a hero, and for the Germans, a traitor.”
“Okay,” I said. “That was then. And now? If you go to Germany now, what do you think the Germans would say?”
“Well, they probably wouldn’t know who he was and wouldn’t care anyway. And Russia isn’t Germany. You can’t compare them.”
“True,” I said. “But didn’t Kontora blow up those apartment buildings? Isn’t that enough for you not to lose sleep about being a traitor?”
“Well, yes,” he sighed, not really convinced by my logic. “But it remains to be proven that they did it.”
One day in September 2004 in London, after having spent nearly four years investigating the apartment bombings, Sasha came up to me, beaming.
“Have you seen this?” He was holding a copy of The Independent. “Remember you told me about that German guy in Turkey? Here is his picture. His name was Fritz Kolbe. There is a story about him. The Germans made him an official hero. Put a plaque on the wall. So maybe you were right. Maybe our time will come too.”
PART V THE RETURN OF THE KGB
CHAPTER 11 THE EXILES
New York, November 7, 2000
As I entered the New York offices of George Soros, I was expecting an unpleasant conversation. George had learned of my Turkish adventures from the newspapers. The story of the Russian FSB agent who sought asylum in Britain had mysteriously gotten into the evening edition of the Sun while we were still in Heathrow. By morning my name was next to Sasha’s in the Russian press: “Head of Soros Program Smuggles FSB Officer to England.”
I had worked with George for almost ten years, managing some $130 million of his money on advancing Russian reforms, and I was probably the longest lasting member of his Russia team. But our relationship had cooled noticeably of late because we differed on the question of who “lost” Russia. George maintained that the reforms fell victim to the excesses of “unrestrained capitalism,” that the oligarchs corrupted the weak state and impeded the work of the “young reformers.” I, on the contrary, felt that the main problem was the regeneration of the traditional all-powerful Russian bureaucratic police state, and that the only people who could effectively resist this trend were the oligarchs.
Our argument was personified in the figure of Boris Berezovsky. George’s and Boris’s breakup in the aftermath